When Life is In Pieces - DO THIS. 
(p.s. I LOVE YOU)
(p.s. I LOVE YOU)Life just busted into pieces all over the world. It’s still busting up. All sorts of systems are breaking, all sorts of societies and economies are breaking. People are breaking. On a macro level AND a micro level. I don’t know ANYONE who isn’t feeling like their life sort of just exploded, shattered into pieces from the form it was in….
Stay with me, I am not fear-mongering and I’m not going to a dark and depressing place. I want to tell you what I KNOW IS TRUE about breaking.
Life is in pieces. The world is in pieces. Individual lives are in pieces. It’s overwhelming for so many reasons. One of the biggest reasons it feels so overwhelming is because we don’t know how we are going to put it back together.
I’m here though, my friends, to remind you that YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PUT IT BACK TOGETHER HOW IT WAS BEFORE - if you don’t want to.
If your life was perfectly serene…and you wouldn’t change a thing. I support you and invite you to go and search out every piece of it that blew all over creation and put it back together exactly as it was.
If your life needed some adjusting, if it was just too too too much in some places and completely starving for more in other places, I invite you to listen as I give you a different perspective on what this time in your life could open up for you.
We don’t get this opportunity very often…not one JUST LIKE THIS, where we are all doing this together. Of course, we have this opportunity every day, no matter what, but so often we feel like we are solo on our quests to change everything. And…sometimes that feeling of doing it all alone causes us to want to quit.
�Well, this time, we are not solo. We are all experiencing this great big shake up and break up TOGETHER. Now…we are standing in our own lanes, having it happen in our very own lives….but we are not alone, because the people next to us, in their own lanes are also experiencing the shake up and break up of life as they knew it.
So…this is what presents such an incredibly unique opportunity.
Things can go back to how they were before - you can cram things back that way.
Or you can choose THIS MIRACLE TIME to emerge into your life in a different way.
We get to break back together….we are all getting broken right back together.
And as potentially beautiful and exciting as this sounds, I know it’s also so terrifying and devastating and - maddening.
It’s okay if it makes you mad, and sad, and scared and annoyed. It’s okay if you feel resentful and picked on and even ready to throw in the towel. OF COURSE THAT’S HOW YOU FEEL SOMETIMES!
So, honor all of those feelings…and then friend, decide that you’re gonna rise up and use your beautiful gift of choice to look at the pieces of your life, and of YOU all over the floor…all over EVERYWHERE….and you’re going to very intentionally look at the pieces that are recognizable - and you’re going to decide whether they will be a part of your life moving forward or not.
Here are the stages you’ll probably go through when you emerge from the storm cellar to see what the tornado of this time ripped to shreds and shards and pieces.
It might take a few days or weeks or even months of being IN A DAZE…. but at some point, you’re going to go….holy crap. My life broke into pieces…I BROKE INTO PIECES.
STEP 1: Breaking Into Pieces
And you know what? It won’t matter why it happened. It won’t matter how unfair it was, it won’t matter even if you feel like you played a role in any part of the breaking…..
The first step is just knowing that STUFF IS IN PIECES, life is not all together anymore, it’s not in the same state of wholeness or near-wholeness that it was in before. And…you’re probably going to notice that the same is true for just about everyone around you.
During this stage of things, you’re gonna feel lots of different ways, for different amounts of time. It’s grief, my friends. You’re going to feel the stages of grief. And you’re gonna feel a bunch of other feelings too. And all of it is okay. It will pass a lot faster of you don’t resist it. Some days you will feel like you are gonna die and you just want to numb all of your feelings….but sit with them, honor them….and they will pass. Reach out because it makes it easier to talk about it and not try to bypass it with surface-level faux solutions, or pretend it’s not happening.
So here’s the next stage…
STEP 2: Looking at the Pieces Carefully and Honestly
At some point, you can start to look around at the parts of your life that are in pieces. Some of the pieces of your life will just sort of be gone….they got blown to bits. Some still remain. So…look at each of these pieces now as just little pieces of possibility. Look at each piece and think….here’s some raw material of what once remained…look at the possibility and potential that is still left in it…and then set it aside and go to the next piece. Pieces could be things that are your weaknesses or strengths…. they could be parts of what was your identity. They could be things you were working toward or trying to learn. They could be the things you felt obligated to, or things you feel devoted to with all of your heart. The pieces of you that are strewn about could be your beliefs…what you always thought was true….what you felt like you knew was true. These pieces of you and your life could be your relationships, your career, your plans for the future. They could be your favorite color, your house, the food you’ve always eaten. These pieces of you could be your morning routine or where you love to go on vacation. They could be the ways that you serve others in the world, and the way you take care of yourself.
So…..in this stage, you’re looking for the pieces of you, and then you’re looking AT the pieces of you that still remain…..
And guess what? Some of them you might not be able to find. They might be gone. Possibilities that once existed for your life may have blown to tiny particles all over creation and they just aren’t possibilities anymore.
You can cry and feel sad about this. IT IS SAD! IT’s hard…but then, when you feel like you’ve cried all of the tears and you’re ready to move forward…..look at the space this left in your life. Because something that was taking up space and time and thought in your life and in the whole of who you are…when that is gone……it leaves space…….and that might feel like a big old hole of emptiness…and it is….but it is ALSO space for something else….something new…..maybe it’s something that you create by putting remaining pieces of yourself together in a different way….maybe you will take a piece of yourself you really like, and then go and build onto that…and create a new part of you that never existed before in a way that you never allowed yourself or even thought to create yourself this way.
And that leads to the next step….
Now that you’ve looked for what’s left of you, what’s left of your life….you get to make some choices…
YOU GET TO
YOU GET TO
YOU. GET. TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY….
….and like I said, this opportunity doesn’t come along all that often….where the whole world is sort of putting themselves back together…and no one is pressuring anyone else to stay exactly how they are right now.
STEP 3: DECIDE WHAT PIECES YOU WILL MAKE INTO THIS NEW VERSION OF YOUR LIFE -Pick Up The Pieces You Still Want - the pieces of YOU, the pieces of your life.
Because no one is exactly as they were. Life is not exactly as it was. Things are not going to go back to how they used to be. Too much has happened, too much has changed, too many things broke into too many pieces.
BUT HERE IS WHERE WE ARE…IN THIS AWESOME PLACE….
Here is where YOU ARE.
YOU GET TO pick up the pieces of yourself and of your life, and you get to leave other pieces on the floor….to dissolve into the ground. You don’t have to pick up the pieces that you don’t want a part of anymore. You don’t have to put poison things back in your life, you don’t have to start doing things again that were killing you before.
You get to decide what gets to come back into your life.
This is a really cool thing to GET TO DO
This is where you…..
Pick Up The Pieces You Still Want - the pieces of YOU, the pieces of your life.
So then that leaves other pieces that still need to be dealt with…..
and this is the step where you :
STEP 4: HONOR AND RELEASE THE PIECES YOU DON’T WANT ANYMORE
I want to remind you of something really important my friends. YOU GET TO CHANGE. YOU GET TO BE SOMEONE NEW WHENEVER YOU FEEL LIKE IT. YOU GET TO GROW, YOU GET TO TRY, YOU GET TO LEARN NEW THINGS, YOU GET TO EXPERIENCE NEW THINGS.
No one can take that beautiful opportunity away from you without your consent. NO ONE.
�So….when you are broken in pieces, when your life is broken in pieces….and you have realized that things can’t be exactly as they were before, and you have realized that there is a whole bunch of stuff that you DON”T WANT TO BE LIKE IT WAS BEFORE…..
STEP 5:
YOU GET TO START MAKING YOUR MOSAIC
Your mosaic of YOU, of YOUR LIFE….you get to take the pieces that matter to you, that feel true…the pieces you’d like to continue to build on, you get to leave the rest behind….
and then you get to start slowly building yourself and your life into a new work of art.
AND YOU DON”T HAVE TO DECIDE RIGHT NOW WHAT THAT WILL LOOK LIKE WHEN IT”S DONE.
It’s okay if it has holes here and there, it’s okay if there are parts that aren’t finished. You get to do this….and it’s okay if it takes a while.
I want to stop for a minute and paste a poem to you that I wrote a while ago when I BROKE INTO PIECES. I often seem to be ahead of the curve on crappy life happenings. It’s happened so many times that I’ve gone through something in a deep and painful way a year or so before lots of other people do…..and so I get to share stuff I’ve learned…this is one of those things. I broke, my life broke….I was in pieces on the floor, so I wrote a poem called…
LET ME BE A MOSAIC….
Let me be a mosaic
I fell in pieces on the floor
A long time coming
I’m not intact anymore
Did I jump from there or did the earth shake?
Was it meant to be?
Did I want to break?
And does it matter?
Here I am.
I’m going to be a mosaic.
I have no idea what picture I will make.
I don’t know which pieces I will choose.
You can be anything when there’s nothing left to lose.
Let me be a mosaic.
And don’t cry and holler like it’s some kind of mistake.
I still don’t know what shape I will take.
One that allows some bend and isn’t afraid to break.
I’m okay that I won’t be quite the same.
I’ve held water, mud and darkness and now I hold the flame.
I’m leaving pieces on the floor-
Pieces that I don’t want a part of anymore.
They might be the very pieces that you liked about me best...
…nonetheless, I’m putting them to rest.
It’s not a mistake.
I am a mosaic.
Ok…..
The last step my friends is this….
STEP 7: PUTTING YOURSELF BACK TOGETHER slowly, intentionally, with patience…
allowing space for what’s to come that might look like holes, cracks, unfinished parts.
That’s where we all get to be together. And…my only thought about this, during this time is to be open to the possibility that you could come back together in a different way than anything you’ve ever thought of or dreamed of…and all of it is okay. All of it is beautiful.
I hope you will be kind and patient and merciful with yourself.
I hope you’ll join me.
I love you, you matter to me, I believe in you.
You are a beautiful mosaic. So beautiful.
xoxo-melody ross
